The beauty of hiking

(≈4 min read)

Growing up, I was fortunate enough to play a huge variety of sport, ranging from the fairly ordinary – football, cricket, table tennis, golf and badminton – to the somewhat weird – squash and snooker. But I can say with a considerable degree of conviction that my favourite by quite a margin was and still is the act of simply walking.

Or as it’s more commonly referred to as…hiking.

In this article, I’m going to explain exactly why I love it so much and why you really should give it a go too.

Hiking improves your mental resilience

Ok so you how many times have you heard someone say something is going to be an ‘uphill climb’?

The whole comparison between mountain climbing and mental resilience is everywhere. But why? What exactly is it about mountain climbing that makes it a perfect metaphor for working towards a goal?

Well, we all know the feeling – the feeling of getting a top grade after months of studying or crossing that finish line after running for hours or noticing the muscles on your body after months of training. It’s pretty clear that there’s something intrinsically rewarding about short term suffering for a higher goal.

That struggle on the mountain where your legs are burning and your mind is compelling you to give up – you learn to love that feeling because you know what’s waiting at the summit. The more pain required to reach the summit, the bigger that swarm of euphoria will be when you eventually get there.

For me, hiking offers a way of training for the current climate we live in. In the modern world, there’s a significant degree of emphasis on working hard in the present for a brighter future.

Hiking simulates these conditions pretty damn perfectly. Learning to battle through the pain, learning to become mentally resilient and push past that barrier when all those thoughts of surrender come cascading in; that’s a superpower of sorts you slowly grow the more you hike. In fact eventually you actually start to somewhat love that pain; the pain you know is growing you.

For me, that feeling of battling through the discomfort and reaching that end goal, whether that’s the top of a mountain or reaching 100,000 steps in a day, is a feeling that’s very difficult to replicate elsewhere. As Rafael Nadal said:

“I learned during my career to enjoy suffering.”

There’s this inherent tendency for us, as humans, to enjoy fantasising over the end result (the lean body, the athletic endurance, the flexibility) but to despise the actual process required to get there. Sitting in your bed and thinking about what it’d feel like to be a healthy weight is unfortunately a very different thing to when your muscles are burning and your forehead is dripping with sweat and your entire body feels like collapsing. We don’t want to feel that kind of pain. We want the end result yet are not willing to adhere to the process required to get there.

Hiking provides a way of practising how to deal with this problem. We are forced to, instead of fixating on the end goal, focus on the journey. We learn to love the discomfort. And being able to adopt this mentality could prove super valuable when it comes to anything else you might want to achieve in life.

Even good things which are not fitness related require some degree of prior pain. Often, things that you’re initially anxious about, you end up actually really enjoying and you never would have experienced that joy, if you’d have been completely discomfort avoidant. You can’t have love without fear of rejection. You can’t achieve great things without fear of failure.

Hiking helps promote the mind-set which pushes that instead of living your life based on running away from anxiety and all these negative things that might arise, you should instead be looking to run towards the things you do want and learning to cope with those negative emotions along the way.

Now there’s obviously a clear distinction that needs to be made from pain that is for a higher pursuit and unnecessary pain. The pain we’re talking about here is the same kind of pain you experience when you go to the gym.

I’m not referring to the pain you experience when your dunk your hand into a bucket of boiling water to see what it feels like. These types of experiences offer unnecessary suffering – something we should undoubtedly avoid.

Hiking helps you to connect with nature

Although I love hiking for fun in my local area, the best kind of hiking for me occurs when I’m detached from civilisation. I usually experience this when I travel to either countryside hills or the mountains.

In my eyes at least, there’s something quite otherworldly and enthralling about truly connecting and being present with the natural world. Nature is quite possibly the only thing that has survived the wrath of man, the one constant in this constantly evolving climate.

In modern society, you look around and see a world sucked of life, green land replaced with factories and houses and businesses trying to reel in as much money from consumers as physically possible.

And although this evolution is somewhat necessary, sometimes it can be fulfilling, once in a while, to detach yourself from all of that and connect with the one of the few things that is not based on financial gain. Just you and the natural world, as it’s always been.

When you think about it, it really is extraordinary how we find ourselves on this rotating ball in infinite space that so happens to be only the knowable climate that has the perfect conditions for life to thrive. We look around and see grass and mountains and water falling from the sky and squirrels and birds and we don’t ever stop to think about just how wondrous it is we so happened to born on this planet. 

Scientists believe the odds of you being born were around 1 in 400 trillion. Yet here you are. This somewhat extraordinary creature that possesses the ability to speak and read and communicate and think complexly and appreciate beauty. Walking in the hills gives you a chance to think about things, to connect the internal with the external.

There is nothing more basic and beautiful than taking time to be truly grateful for everything that co-exists alongside you, all these creatures that just so happen to exist, that each have little brains and incredibly complex systems within we know nothing about.

A tip to help you better connect with nature

If you want more tips and tricks on how to connect better with nature, check out my mindfulness article, but for now, here’s one of my favourites:

“Imagine whatever you are seeing or experiencing is the first time you’ve ever experienced it”

Whenever you’re walking and it begins to rain, imagine what you’d feel like if you’d never seen rain before.

It’d honestly be incredible. It’d probably seem like some kind of sorcery. There’s literally water coming out of the sky. You’d want to feel that water on your skin, notice its temperature, how it feels when it hits you, maybe even how it tastes.

Same for if you see a deer or an animal. Imagine you’d never seen that animal before. You’d again be imbued with a sense of wonder and curiosity, and that’s exactly the feeling we’re aiming to experience.

Once you’ve seen something enough, it can lose its beauty and this technique helps you snap out of that state of accustomisation and back into that state of gratitude and awe.

Hiking is free!

The wonderful thing about hiking, unlike many other sports, is that it’s completely free! No racquets or equipment (unless you’re climbing Everest or something) required. All you need is yourself and your mind and a place to walk.

Even if there are no mountains near you, you can still learn to practise mindfulness and walking whilst appreciating everything around you in almost any environment. Call me insane, but there are still so many wondrous things to behold in your local park.

For me, the more you’re able to step out of this bubble society has you encased in and actually experience the world, the better the experience will be. As I previously mentioned, for more advice on how be more mindful when walking check out my article.

Hiking has health benefits

And on top of all the things I’ve already mentioned, hiking is also a form of exercise. There’s an extensive collection of research on the numerous benefits walking consistently can bring. In fact it’s almost unanimously accepted that walking is unequivocally positive for your health.

It reduces the risk of heart disease, increases your muscle strength and endurance, helps you sleep better, reduces body fat, improves your circulation and I could go on but I’m sure by this point you’re bored out of your mind and want me to move on.

So in conclusion, even if you feel as if walking might bore you to death, please just give it a try and persist through that initial mental barrier your brain will inevitably construct. Trust me, you won’t regret it.